Anarchist People of Color (APOC) is a political tendency made up of collectives and individuals across the United States and elsewhere who discuss and organize around projects of importance to people and communities of colour.
APOC came to visibility on February 20, 2001 with the founding by Ernesto Aguilar of an email list and website focused on APOC and various theorists and activists of colour. Its purpose is to give radicals of color the tools to agitate among communities of colour for anti-authoritarian solutions, and to give those who identified with anti-authoritarian political ideals a space of cultural acceptance and engagement.
While there was no explicit inspiration for APOC, work by Black anarchists such as Kuwasi Balagoon and Martin Sostre, and especially Ashanti Alston and Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, has been cited as a precursor. In the early 1990s, organizing by the defunct collectives Black Autonomy International (formerly Black Autonomy and previously the Federation of Black Community Partisans) and Black Fist has also been referenced as part of the roots from which APOC was created.
Not only does APOC need you to join the movement, but we need organizers, artists, theorists, activists, performers and everyone to help build the movement from the bottom up.
Where We Stand
APOC is an autonomous set of politics. Recurring themes in APOC’s politics include, but are not limited to:
- Grassroots organizing and agitating with/among communities of color around relevant issues.
- Building a revolutionary autonomous politics inspired by people of color, with respect to our voices, experiences and perspectives.
- Advocating global self-determination for people of color, including cultural respect in the context of anti-authoritarian ideals, and confrontation of white supremacy and white privilege.
- Supporting creation of organizing and political space for people of color, including people of color-only spaces.
- Demanding that political movements must sincerely and actively serve the needs of communities of color and impart anti-authoritarian politics in the process.
These principles have ignited a wide variety of organizing:
- Local collectives that fight to serve the needs of communities of color and inject autonomous politics and vision to organizing, as well as press multiracial political movements on matters of inclusion and anti-oppression activism.
- APOC Blocs at political demonstrations, such as the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas 2003 protests in Miami, organized to show the strength of united action by people of color.
- Community outreach activities, such as for Hurricane Katrina, geared at putting grassroots organizing by and for people of color to practice.
- Political education, film screenings, gatherings and other activities aimed at building solidarity and drawing out discussions about connections among oppressed people and internal colonies.
- Speakouts and open critique of racism in political movements, as well as exposing attempts to avoid accountability for white privilege and to detract from potentially legitimate concerns over bigotry.
APOC-allied activists of color work to change the collective conditions of people of color and upend the dynamics as we know it. APOC needs you.
How to Get Involved
Today people of color — Black, Brown and Third World revolutionaries all — are on the streets, speaking out and organizing for revolutionary change. Police brutality, the prison-industrial complex and imperial wars are just a few of the issues facing our communities, and more and more people of color have had enough. There are many ways to get active:
To join a collective or announce the creation of a new collective visit http://illvox.org/. Topics currently on illvox include; African Anarchism: The History of A Movement; Analysis on Politics & Race; Anarchism and the Black Revolution; Anarchist People of Color; Cuban Anarchism: The History of A Movement
Swindon Anarchist Group (SwAG) 